Faith
by Flighty Wren
Summary: After the events at Alcatraz the government has passed the Mutant Registration Act. This is one mutant's thoughts on faith-and the lack thereof-as she waits to be registered. OC


I had never been religious. I didn't go to church, I had never heard a prayer—except in the movies or on TV so that didn't count—or taken sacrament or gone to confession or been baptized. I wasn't Jewish or Catholic or Protestant or Muslim or Baptist or Mormon or any of the other religions out there. My family didn't even have a bible in our house. The only religious item we had was a rosary that my great-great-great grandmother had brought with her from Spain back in the eighteen hundreds. It was an old string with thick wooden beads on it that had long since lost their red paint and had a cross in its center the size of my middle finger. It was long enough to hang down to my knees when I wore it—not that I did wear it. I had never been religious but I was clutching that rosary, worn from use, like a lifeline, running my fingers over its beads. I didn't even know how to use the thing. So I just held it, feeling like a complete idiot. I held that rosary and recited every prayer or part of a prayer that I could ever remember hearing, since back before I could remember.

_Father who art in heaven . . ._

I didn't know the end of that one. I sighed, passing a few beads under my fingers as I sifted through my memories of half-whispered prayers. I could hear someone in the room praying in what sounded like French. I couldn't understand a single word but my mouth could copy the sounds exactly so it did. The prayer—whatever it was—flowed out of my mouth in easy French, my voice mimicking that of the young man praying, his hands clasped together. I finished after he did, adding a bit in English at the end, and when I was done I looked back to the beads in my hands and sighed, tears pooling in my eyes.

I prayed silently for help, a way out. I prayed that this was all just a bad dream and that I'd wake up and everything would be the way it had been for the past sixteen years of my life. Back before the Cure and the MRA had been passed. I prayed for things to be normal, for them to see that I had never hurt anyone, that I couldn't ever hurt anyone with my mutation. Well . . . that wasn't entirely true. I could bring down the entire government with one phone call if I wanted but I didn't want to . . . so didn't that count for something?

I sighed, untangling one of my hands from the rosary to push my palm into my temple. The noise in here was worse than lunch at school and my ears were throbbing painfully. My curly black hair fell in my face as I tried to banish my headache with little success. I had half a mind to amplify my voice to deafening levels and tell everyone to shut up. It was so loud . . . so loud and I could hear _everything_. Every sniffle, every breath, every heartbeat, every flap of the flies buzzing around the hot room . . . I let out a sound somewhere between a groan, a sob, and a whimper, pushing the heel of my hand into my forehead. It was too loud. It was too loud. The screaming, the crying, the whimpers and sobs and sniffles and hiccups and wailing it was TOO LOUD! I took a deep breath as I knew helped during times like this and when the pain subsided a bit I took another deep breath. I then pulled out my earbuds and shoved them into my ears, turning on the one and only track on my iPod. White noise filled my ears and drowned out everything else that might have wanted to reach me. I sighed in relief, tilting my head back to stare up at the ceiling as I continued fiddling with the rosary.

If there was a God or deity somewhere out there why did he or she make us different? Why did he make it so people hated those of us that had never done anything even remotely wrong or illegal with our powers? Why did he let those hating people get away with corralling us like cattle and registering us like animals? Why did he let them think they had the right to send out our private information so that mutant haters could find us and hurt us or even kill us? Tears welled up in my eyes. Mom always said that my mutation was a gift, that I had it for a reason. Was that reason to be hated by the world for something I had no control over? Was it so I could watch my best friend die because some Friends of Humanity sickos had decided that we shouldn't be alive anymore? Was it so I could have the word _Freak_ spray painted on my house in angry red letters two weeks after a shooting that thirty students had been killed in, or so I could be shunned by the people that had once been my friends or so I could spend my lunches in the third floor girls' bathroom in the handicapped stall with the door locked so no one could spit in my sandwich or steal my water bottle or blame me and my kind for their friends' deaths? Did God hate us all and just wanted a way to get rid of all of us at once?

Another question popped into my mind unbidden. What had made my great-great-great grandmother believe that there was a God, not only worth believing in but worshipping? With one word I answered my own question. _Faith_. Mom was always telling me to have faith that things would work out, to have faith that the humans would see the light, to have faith that they'd finally figure out that we just wanted to live in peace, not pieces. Whenever I came home from school with a split lip and broken heart Mom would hug me until I was sure she'd squeeze the life out of me and whisper the same thing to me.

"Have faith, honey. It'll all be over soon." Faith, it meant to believe in something, to be dutiful to a way of thinking. Believing in something, or someone, that had either let me down in the past or never shown any signs of existing didn't make any sense. Why would anyone put their full trust in someone that they weren't completely sure was there? How could I have faith when I wasn't even sure the thing I believed in existed? And not even God, how could I have faith in people, believe that things would get better? How could I have faith when nothing in the past had ever given me proof that my faith was well-founded? I'd had faith in my supposed friends and look where that had gotten me. I'd had faith that if we kept to ourselves we wouldn't be bothered and they had come into my school and made me watch while they shot my best friend. I'd had faith that my government would keep me and the rest of my kind safe and now I was in a room waiting to be exposed for all of mankind to see. Except for my family everyone and everything I'd ever had faith in had let me down. And I wasn't alone in the room. How could any of these people have faith that this would get better, that we'd someday be able to walk down the street—mutations on display—without the fear of getting accosted?

I looked to the screen over the double doors that so many mutants had already disappeared into. It was displaying the number of the mutant that they wanted to come forward. The number three thousand nine hundred eighty-two flashed across the screen. I looked down at the tiny slip of paper I'd gotten at the door. Two more and it was my turn. I sighed as the next number flashed. One more. Was this what the rest of my life would be like? Rooms full of mutants, all of us scared out of our wits as we waited for some government official to decide our fates? And what happened if they deemed me a danger to society? Would they put me in jail? Would they sew my mouth shut so I could never use my ability again? Or would they send me to a lab like some other mutants had? I watched as my number flashed across the screen. I wiped my tears away before they could fall down my cheeks with the hand holding the rosary. I didn't pull my earbuds out as I got to my feet and wove through the crowd, more than once bumping into someone. No one bothered to even look mad at me though. We were all too scared and worried to start fights. I paused just barely outside the double doors, my grip on the rosary tightening as I looked at the imposing doors.

I wasn't religious, even now as my future—or perhaps lack thereof—loomed over me like a vulture circling a dying animal. But I closed my eyes and whispered a silent prayer before pushing the doors open, my fingers holding tight to the simple rosary that seemed to be my lifeline. Even if I didn't believe in God, even if there _wasn't_ a God or some higher power out there it couldn't hurt to have a little faith, if not in God or whatever was out there . . . then in humanity. Maybe Mom was right. Maybe the people praying in the room behind me were right. Maybe, just maybe, if I had faith this whole thing would work out.

_A/N Okay, so this was just a little something I came up with while reading a fic about how a mutant deals with the Mutant Registration Act getting passed. I don't know if I'll use this character again in the future for another X-Men fic but if I do, I'll tell you. Also, I did not write this meaning to offend anyone's faith. Personally, I'm a perfectly happy Mormon girl. I just thought that writing from the point of view of someone that doesn't believe in God would be interesting. Please don't bite my face off. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you didn't, well, I can't really do anything about that._


End file.
